Imperial College London is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In line with this it supports the principle that ‘the results of research that have been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain’ and therefore it encourages all its academic and research staff and students to make their research available through open access (OA). The College continues to engage with research funders to develop sustainable open access publication strategies and with publishers to develop affordable routes to OA publishing.

Imperial’s academics, researchers, staff and students are free to publish in journals of their choice. Where funders encourage or mandate open access and/or where funding for open access publishing is available through the growing number of “Read and Publish” or “Transformative” agreements negotiated with publishers[1], this should normally be the preferred route. Green open access (within the permitted embargo periods) should normally be used where funding for gold is unavailable.         

The College has implemented an open access mandate for all research publications, subject to publishers’ copyright policy, to be deposited in Spiral. Since January 2012, this has meant that authors are required to upload their final peer reviewed copy of the paper into Spiral. The mandate does not require deposit of papers published before 2012. However, papers published before this date can be added to Spiral if you want to do so.         

The Imperial Open Access Fund supports researchers to publish their research on open access. The fund is available to academic, postdoctoral staff and PhD students at Imperial College London. It will pay for the open access publication costs for articles in fully open access journals only. You can apply to the fund by using the ‘Deposit your work’ link in Symplectic.         

From 2021, matters relating to open access publishing at the College are managed by the  College Research Committee[2], and supporting infrastructure and services are delivered by Library Services, ICT, the Research Office, Strategic Planning and other research support staff and units. The Imperial RCUK Fund Management Policy is regularly reviewed by the Research Office and Library Services, in consultation with the College Research Committee.

This policy was last reviewed by the CRC on 14^th April 2021.